OS X 10.4 Tiger has been around for a while now, as has Dashboard and Apple’s take on widgets. However, there’s still quite a few tricks that even seasoned widget users may not know…
There’s a couple of ways Dashboard can be opened.
It’s worth noting that pressing F12 or using the Mighty Mouse’s nipple button works in “toggle” mode—click to open Dashboard, then click to close. However, both can be used to view Dashboard temporarily by holding down the key/button for longer than a second then letting go.
Downloading and installing widgets is usually pretty easy.
There’s two ways of deleting widgets. The first is via Apple’s widget manager. Simply open Dashboard, click on the (+) icon, then click “Manage Widgets”. The red “-” next to the name of each widget can be used to delete the widget.
The second method to delete a widget entails removing its file by hand from your home folder (username/Library/Widgets/). Just find the widget’s file and drag it into the trash.
You don’t need to be very accurate when positioning the mouse pointer over the (+) symbol, just click anywhere in the bottom left hand corner of the screen. This also works for the Dashboard tray’s left and right arrows—simply click on the side of the screen in the Dashboard tray to scroll. It’s worth noting that with OS X 10.4, Apple also changed the way the Apple and Spotlight menus work too—they now have much larger click-regions, extending all the way to the screen corners.
Some aspects of Dashboard can be a bit of a pain to navigate. These shortcuts will help:
Press apple-shift-4, press space, then click on the widget. A screen shot of the widget called “Picture 1″ (or “Picture 2″, “Picture 3″ etc) will appear on your desktop.
Holding shift while clicking the (+) button or pressing F12 slows down the animation so that the effects can be seen in all their glory. This works for some (but not all) of Dashboard’s animation, as well as other functions in OS X, like Expose and minimising windows.
Simply drag the Dashboard icon out of the dock (it’ll show a cloud puff icon to let you know it’s going to be removed). If you’d like to restore it, just find the Dashboard application in your Applications folder, and drag it back into the dock.
Double-click the widget to install it from the Finder. When the widget installer asks “Do you want to install the widget “widget name” and open it in Dashboard?”, simply hold down the Apple and option keys and “Install” will change to “Run”. Click “Run” and the widget will be run from its current location rather than being moved to /Library/Widgets/. Brilliant!
If you’re having problems with a widget and would like to restore it to its state when it was first installed, then deleting its
preferences might be the way to go. Please note that doing this will probably remove all custom settings.
To restore a widget
to its default settings, please do the following:
It should now be restored. Please be careful and make sure you delete the correct preference file!
Removing the items in ~/Library/Caches/DashboardClient/ can speed up Dashboard’s loading time. Please be careful when poking around the Library if you don’t know what you’re doing!
This isn’t supposed to be a developer document, but it can sometimes be handy knowing how to see the inner workings of a widget. To do so, simply control-click or right click the widget’s icon in the finder, then select “Show Package Contents”. This will open up the widget’s package in a new window (packages are just special folders).
A CSS file that styles the entire Dashboard can be found here inside the Dock application (/System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app). Just edit Contents/Resources/DashboardClient.app/Contents/Resources/widget.css. It might be worth backing the file up first though!
Similarly, you can alter the look of the Dashboard tray’s background by editing /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/perf.png inside the Dock appliction.
Enjoy!